If you’re planning a Design Summit for your Grand Challenge, look at what we put together for the Huntsman Mental Health Institute’s Grand Challenge to end the stigma surrounding mental health and substance use disorders. Feel free to borrow it for your work.
Our mission statement is to unite all our passion, drive, and expertise into powerful strategic actions that end the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders. Last week, on October 10, World Mental Health Day, we convened 195 people from 135 organizations for the Mental Health Anti-Stigma Design Summit. It was a fantastic way to celebrate our shared mission.
Are you planning a Grand Challenge? Below is an outline of our goals for the Mental Health Anti-Stigma Design Summit. Watch the video above for a deeper look into each goal and summit experience.
Goal 1: Establish context for the Grand Challenge.
- We asked and answered questions like:
- · Why are we choosing stigma?
- · Why is it important to eliminate now?
- · What is a grand challenge, and how does it work?
Goal 2: Launch a national network
Before the design summit, we had 30 organizations on board with our Grand Challenge. Now we have 130 – exponential growth that will lead us to scale. As we reach through the social and stakeholder networks connected to each participating organization, we will grow from hundreds to thousands.
Goal 3: Create synergies and sustain collaboration
How do you connect hundreds of organizations with a common agenda but work in different industries, engage in various activities, and access different resources?
- Create interest groups – based on a survey of our summit participants, we’ll create 30 groups
- Align communication strategies – communication between the interest groups and among the network, in general, is critical
- Create an accessible network by making it easy for people to find each other and collaborate
- Collect and incorporate feedback
Watch the video above to learn how we used the design summit to:
- Determined which interest groups to form
- Communicated mission, vision, values, and goals to the grand challenge participants
- Encouraged collaboration within an accessible network
- Collected, reviewed, and incorporated feedback.
Goal 4: Discuss metrics, equity, inclusion, and lessons learned in successful anti-stigma work.
Every successful collective impact initiative is centered on equity. Intersectionality makes equity challenging. Learning how to communicate with many different groups in a way that works for all while at the same time building a national movement is difficult. In the video, I cover how the Huntsman Mental Health Institute addresses equity in its grand challenge to end the stigma surrounding mental health and substance use disorders.
In addition to the goals outlined above, we used the summit to develop a communication plan and keep the collaboration moving forward post-summit.
The design summit is also an opportunity to collect feedback – critical to our 3rd goal of creating synergy. Our partners at Parthenon Management Group (PMG) offered an actionable summary of feedback collected throughout the summit. Suggestions included:
- Form and widely share a strategic plan for The Grand Challenge.
- Clearly distinguish between interest and working groups and define the scope of both groups. Interest groups are self-directed communities of people committed to similar ant-stigma work, and working groups are teams that support a specific function of The Grand Challenge. Both groups are integral parts of The Grand Challenge.
- Strengthen the equity and inclusion plan for The Grand Challenge.
- Establish a marketing plan.
- Keep the collaboration going post-Summit through interest groups, working groups, and a newsletter.
- Develop a communication plan that supports ongoing dialogue between partner organizations in The Grand Challenge and the backbone organization.
Finally, one of the most exciting parts of the design summit was the attendance and participation of The Ad Council – creators of some of our most recognizable icons, including:
- Rosie, the Riveter, helps women support World War II
- Smokey The Bear to stop forest fires
- “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” – the moniker that so many people use successfully to save lives
The Ad Council conducted independent research on the state of mental health in the United States, which formed much of our design summit and grand challenges initiative. They will use feedback from our design summit to create custom toolkits for the partners of our initiative.
There are no fees to participate in a Grand Challenge. If you are interested in joining our efforts to end the stigma around mental health and substance use disorders, email me at Seth@visionaryleadership.com. Become a part of this national movement today.
